“Right you are! I will be round in a minute,” said Northcote, shaking hands with his old schoolfellow and declining an invitation to dine in Eaton Square the next evening but one.
XXX
SIR JOSEPH BRUDENELL
In the judge’s room Northcote found its occupant seated in an armchair at the side of the fire. The light was subdued, and the face of the old man was in shadow even while he rose to receive his visitor.
“I thank you for coming to see me, Mr. Northcote,” he said, in a low voice. “I will not detain you long, but I hope you will sit down.”
Northcote accepted the seat that was indicated opposite to the judge’s armchair. His curiosity was roused in a strange fashion by the manner and tone of this old man. They were extremely kind and gentle, almost those which an aged and benevolent parent might employ when about to take leave of a favorite son.
“If you will allow an old advocate,” said the judge, leaning back in his chair and placing the tips of his fingers together, “to affirm it again, I have been impressed by your conduct of this case. My memory carries me back a long way; I have been more than fifty years at the bar and on the bench. During that period I have been brought into contact with the greatest advocates of their day, and I have been called upon to bear a part in many of the leading causes. But never, Mr. Northcote,—I emphasize the word,—has it been my privilege to witness a performance so remarkable on the part of one who is young and untried as the one given by you to-day.
“In the first place, and bearing in mind the limited character of your opportunities, I cannot pretend to know how it has been achieved. Your cross-examination of the last witness called for the Crown was, in my view, masterly. I have always held, and many will support me, I am sure, that the art of cross-examination is a searching test of an advocate. To the ordinary person even moderate skill in that supremely difficult branch only comes with years and experience. But you begin, Mr. Northcote, where many of true distinction are only able to leave off.
“I have always been proud, jealous—I might say overjealous perhaps—of my profession, to which I have given the flower of my maturity; and I have always felt that whatever degree of talent it may please God to bestow upon a man, this great profession of ours offers a field which brings it to the test. You must let me say, Mr. Northcote, that when I heard you deal with that poor woman this morning, and I heard you frame those questions which you put to her with a really beautiful sincerity which told heavily with the jury, I felt proud that so young a man could stand up so fearlessly and so collectedly in his first great criminal cause and put to so fine a use the talents that God had given to him. Had you been my own son I could not have felt prouder of you, and prouder of the traditions that you were upholding. Many of the great lights of the past came before my eyes—Pearson, now the Lord Chief Justice; Hutton, the Master of the Rolls; poor, dear Fred Markham, in many respects the most brilliant of them all, who was cut off, poor fellow, almost before he had reached his prime; the late George Stratton; Lord Ballinogue; Walker; Skeffington; and I know not how many more—but I did not hesitate to believe, although we old men are tenacious of our prejudices, that the bounty of nature had placed you already on their level, and that great and good and glorious as were all these names I have mentioned, you were starting at the point where they were content to end.”
Northcote leaned forward and lowered his head with a fierce, almost uncontrollable sensation of bewilderment, in which, however, pain was predominant. Every word that was uttered by that low, trembling, old voice appeared to spring from the heart. It was something more than an old man babbling of his youth. There was a pride, an eagerness, a solicitude, in the manner of this aged judge which seemed to clasp Northcote like the impersonal devotion of a noble woman to something more radiant but less pure and less rare than that which emanates from herself. In the keenness of his distress it was as much as Northcote could do to refrain from rushing from the room.
“Yet, Mr. Northcote,” the old man went on, “if I say this of your cross-examination, which as far as you are concerned was a thing of the moment, a mere piece of esprit thrown off without premeditation, what shall I say of that address with which you conquered all who listened to it? I speak no longer as a judge, Mr. Northcote; my livery is laid by. As I sat there in court with every chord in my heart responsive to the noble music of your voice, I felt that you had brought home to me that the time had come when I had ceased to be of service to the public. I shall take my seat on the bench no more. But henceforward I shall always carry your words in my heart. They were noble words, nobly spoken; nature has been almost wantonly lavish to you in her gifts. It has been given to you, a young man, to show that the completest abasement of human nature is not in the gutter. I read the deeper and the truer meaning that was innermost, the divine message that was unfolded by the deep vibrations of your singularly beautiful voice. You revealed to one in that court, Mr. Northcote, who should have been engaged in performing his duty to the public, that no sore festers in our social life to-day like the organized degradation of the police-court, where learning, wisdom, courage, and integrity are debased to even fouler depths than the gutter by their constant traffic in human misery. Many times, Mr. Northcote, have I cowered in spirits since I have been called to my office, but it has remained for you, a young advocate, a fledgling of a newer and grander generation, which will touch this material world of ours to finer issues—it has remained for you to knock at the door of the citadel of the oldest of his Majesty’s judges, and to put questions that he cannot answer. You forced him to say to himself, ‘Tell me, Joseph Brudenell, what law you are obeying when you take your seat on these cushions, and you endeavor to fulfil the functions of the office to which you have allowed yourself to be called?’